Next week will be an exciting one for a handful of scientists with the announcement of the 2013 Nobel prizes. With the recent experimental confirmation of the Higgs boson last year at the Large Hadron Collider, rumours are beginning to swirl that the physics prize might go to some of the physicists who predicted its existence and the mechanism that gives mass to matter in the Universe.

James Clerk Maxwell realised, in 1864, that electricity and magnetism were just two sides of the same coin and that light was made up of electromagnetic waves. He developed an elegant theory describing the unified force of electromagnetism and the equations that describe the dynamics of an electromagnetic field now carry his name.

If you're looking for a change of scene next Tuesday lunchtime why not go along to hear Raymond Flood, Gresham Professor of Geometry, talk about "Butterflies, Chaos and Fractals", 1pm on Tuesday, 17 September 2013, at the Museum of London. It's just one of a selection of great free public lectures given by Gresham Professors over the upcoming months.

Images are now being taken on the world's most powerful digital camera. For over 500 nights over the next five years the Dark Energy Camera will photograph the light from more than 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each image.